In this May 7, 2020 opinion piece in Fortune, Sheryl Sandberg and Rachel Thomas outline the ways in which the pandemic has placed a greater burden on women who are trying to juggle work and home responsibilities. They share that employers, managers, elected officials, and partners need to to more to help lighten that load.
The “Let’s Work” speaker series sponsored by The Laundress invites female entrepreneurs and thought leaders to share their thoughts during this unique time in our world. The speaker series is happening on different days over the next several weeks at noon (ET). The series is also exciting in that there are breakoff sessions (zoom rooms) for the attendees to network amongst themselves in addition to the keynote speaker. Click this link to register (for free!) for the session. Upcoming speakers include:
The female leaders in Germany, Taiwan, New Zealand, Iceland, Finland, Norway and Denmark are showing the world that when women leverage their own unique leadership styles, the results can exceed those of the more traditional model. This Forbes article highlights how these leaders used transparency, technology and empathy to handle the pandemic and keep their citizens safe.
Whether you are launching your business and trying to keep costs low by working out of your own home…or if the Coronavirus has you working from home because of “social distancing” requirements, here is a piece from NPR with some helpful tips for how to make working from home as productive as working from an office (or maybe even more productive!)
And for those of you reading this who are enrolled in the Bank of America Institute for Women’s Entrepreneurship at Cornell online certificate program, you are already ahead of the curve because you have embraced “distance” learning!
If you are looking for a new podcast to add to your listening list, we suggest trying a few episodes of the “Guilty Feminist“. We recently listened to “Episode 184: Things We Wish We’d Known with Kate O’Donnell and guests Charlotte Keatley and Jenny George”
One part we loved was at the end of that episode when the host Deborah Foster Wallace says:
“People believe what you tell them. You tell the story of you and that is what they believe. Very few people are correcting your story of you. If you come into a room and say ‘I’m not sure about this but…’, the story you are telling is that ‘I don’t really trust myself’. Very few people in life will say ‘You don’t trust yourself but I think you should and I’m going to.’ Occasionally someone does and that person is called a mentor. That’s what a mentor is – someone who says ‘I believe in you more than you believe in you.’ You will get maybe two mentors in a lifetime if you are lucky. Everyone else believes what you tell them. So tell them the story ‘I trust me’ and people will trust you with more responsibility, opportunity, money, influence, etc. We need to walk into rooms as though we’ve been invited. Often we walk into rooms we’ve been invited into and act as though we weren’t. We’ve got to cut that sh*t out.”
The Tory Burch Foundation, a nonprofit to empower women, is bringing together leaders, activists, and performers to challenge bias and create new norms at the 2020 Embrace Ambition Summit being held on March 5th in NYC from 9am to 6:30pm . You can sign up here to watch a livestream of the event.
Despite women owning 40% of all the businesses in the U.S., in 2018, less than 2 percent of women-owned businesses generated more than $1 million in sales (and that percentage is even lower when you only look at women of color). This article in Entrepreneur explores ten common mistakes that include: trying to do it all yourself, not spending enough time working with mentors and coaches, lack of a cash runway and not understanding the scalable aspects of the business.
Two articles appeared recently discussing the importance of more openly sharing personal salary information as well as financial management strategies. “Build Your Squad For Financial Success” appeared in Entrepreneur and focuses on how women of color can help lift each other up by more openly sharing salary ranges, negotiation tips and business collaboration.
A New York Times piece published the same week entitled, “I’ll Share My Salary Information if You Share Yours” shared how more and more women are openly discussing topics that were historically considered taboo – salaries, stock options, signing bonuses, negotiation tactics and both “dream” and “walk-away” numbers.
While most entrepreneurs will never end up on the reality show Shark Tank, there are interesting lessons to be learned from those who have. From intellectual property protection to accepting feedback to envisioning your outcome to maintaining confidence to believing your gut, this piece on Medium shares important takeaways from ten women who pitched to the “sharks”.
Happy 2020! As we head into a new year and new decade, we thought it would be useful to share this article from Fast Company that highlights four different women and how resolutions they made (ditching a business partner, creating a remote workforce, embracing the present and increasing prices) forever impacted their professional trajectories and businesses.